On August 7th,
President Obama authorized airstrikes on Iraq in nominal support of a
besieged population of about 10,000 Yezidis, a Kurdish ethnic
minority, who were placed under siege by the Sunni Jihadist Islamic
State, henceforth to be referred to as (ISIS). In mainstream media,
the intervention has been criticized as backtracking on what is
already a quagmire precipitated by the 2003 American invasion under
Bush II, and an occupation inherited and supervised by Obama from
2008-11. Another argument is that Obama is showing his support for
the autonomous region of Kurdistan, a US ally whose leaders provided
pivotal assistance to the United States during the 2003-2011 Iraq
War.

The document that
follows offers a brief history of the Islamic State entity and the
method by which US policies under both Bush and Obama facilitated its
growth, primarily through the opening of power vacuums created via
ill-advised and ruinous imperialist policies. The underlying irony of
this story is that George W. Bush fabricated a premise for invading
Iraq under the assumption that Saddam Hussein was harboring al Qaeda
operatives, and what has resulted from the events set in motion by
the US invasion is the fall of a significant portion of Iraq to an
organization even worse than al Qaeda, and the establishment of a
jihadist haven the likes of which bin Laden could have only dreamed.

This is a long
document and filled with a great deal of information about a topic
greatly affecting the lives of millions of innocents across the
world. I hope that it finds you well. A few notes on clarification of
terms before I begin…

ISIS has gone
through several transformations. I will detail each stage, as well as
the US’s role within each of them. They are as follows:

Jama’at al Tawhid w’al Jihad (JTJ)

Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)

The Islamic State in Iraq (ISI)

The Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS)

The Islamic State (IS)

Note: I am
referring to the current incarnation of the Islamic State as ISIS
because it is the abbreviation most familiar to the Western audience
and because it is extremely annoying to use the IS
abbreviation, particularly when typing the phrase "IS
is…"

Jama’at
al Tawhid w’al Jihad

The original incarnation of ISIS was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America’s
"boogeyman" in Iraq between the years of 2003-6. The information I
obtained and present to you here on JTJ and Zarqawi is derived from Loretta
Napoleoni’s 2005 book, Insurgent
Iraq, which is the best English-language resource on his life and early
organizational activities. JTJ was, at first, distinct from al-Qaeda in operations,
but identical in ideology. It was one of the myriad jihadist groups that incubated
in Afghanistan during the 90s up until the US began dropping bombs there in
2001. Zarqawi and his militia left Afghanistan to take refuge with (ironically)
the Kurdish branch of al-Qaeda, who were based in the northern mountain ranges
of Iraq. It is worth mentioning that this migration by Zarqawi from Afghanistan
to Iraq was one of the key pretexts that the White House under Bush II gave
for invading the country in the first place. Saddam had nothing to do with facilitating
Zarqawi’s arrival, however, as he was enemies with the Kurds and especially
antagonistic toward foreign jihadists.

I will spend what
may seem like an inordinate amount of time talking about Zarqawi, but
it is necessary because he is the physical and spiritual progenitor
of ISIS. If we follow the “great man” theory of history,
I would say that there would be no ISIS today without Zarqawi and his
“vision.” He embodied a mission so extreme and performed
acts of violence so horrific, that he essentially tore through the
fabric of the existing state paradigms of the region. The vacuum he
left in his wake would be filled, successfully it would seem, by his
successors.

Zarqawi and his
JTJ did not participate in battles against US forces until August of
2003. By that time, they had had the opportunity allow the occupying
forces to settle in and had scouted their positions and tactics. JTJ
selected terrorism as its strategy for dominating Iraq, and its
inaugural bombing campaign was directed at both US forces as well as
Shiite civilians. It was the attacks on the Shiites which immediately
perturbed the jihadist leadership in Afghanistan,
including bin Laden who,
at first, demanded Zarqawi cease killing Muslims. While most
jihadists were all for attacking US forces, attacking Shiites was
viewed as too extreme and counterproductive. In the eyes of the al
Qaeda bosses of the time, Shiites were still Muslims, even if they
were not Sunnis, and the goal of bin Laden in particular was to unite
all of the Muslims against the United States in order to expel them
from Iraq.

Bin Laden,
however, was not on the ground to understand the situation from the
lens of Zarqawi. Through Zarqawi’s looking glass, tainted as it
was, the Shiites were collaborators with the US occupation and thus
enemies of the Sunnis. The key thing to focus on here is that the US
deliberately
adopted a sectarian-based strategy to divide and conquer Iraq from
the outset of its invasion.
They intentionally took sides on a sectarian basis, exploiting a key
division in society which ended up backfiring in their face as I will
expound upon later.

Pre-invasion, the
US had negotiated with a number of Iraqi dissidents, but the majority
of the Iraqis who helped the United States plan the invasion were
Shiites and Kurds. Thus, these became the favored groups and,
notably, the US did not station its forces in the Shiite south of
Iraq, instead leaving the responsibility up to the British whose
mission was more symbolic than operations-oriented.

Meanwhile,
Zarqawi migrated from Kurdistan and found refuge amongst the Iraqi
Sunni tribes in West and Central Iraq.

Iraqi Tribal
System

It is necessary
to talk about this system because it is a key part of the conflict
and often overlooked. Norman Cigar, a researcher and professor at the
Marine Corps University, wrote a highly detailed and informative book
on the tribal dynamics between Salafist organizations and the Iraqi
tribes. I obtained much of my information on the politics of these
tribes from him. The tribal system is exactly as it sounds: it is an
ancient institution which distributes power and control on a
hereditary basis. Within each tribe, there is a subset of clans, then
individual families, and so on. The largest tribal confederations in
Iraq number in the hundreds of thousands and the largest tribe, the
Dulaim, is three million strong. These people essentially enforce
their own laws, and the failure to end or marginalize the tribal
system by local state actors is a large reason why the Middle East
remains so backward and violent. They essentially act as a
state-within-a-state and have proved to be wonderful proxies for
meddling foreign powers, including the British during the colonial
era.

Cigar notes that
the Sunni tribes also came into prominence in Iraq after the
Iran-Iraq war and First Gulf War in 1991. Saddam was badly weakened
internally by these conflicts and thus fell back on the tribes to
bail him out politically as Shiites and Kurds began rebellions
against his rule. Tribal leaders assumed high ranks in the Iraqi
Army, thus entrenching their power. The tribes became Iraq’s
powerbrokers and naturally saw the US invasion and Saddam’s
subsequent demise as a direct threat to their newfound dominance.

However the
tribal system has its weaknesses. Because tribes are so enormous, and
because power is concentrated at the very top of the hierarchy in
accord with an irrational tradition where heredity implies merit, the
tribes give rise to large swathes of disaffected men. Essentially,
the tribal system can be modeled with a pyramid structure where the
men at the bottom lose out on privileges, i.e. jobs, monetary
handouts, and wives. Furthermore, because Islam permits polygamy with
up to four wives, men at the bottom of this pyramid often miss out on
mating opportunities. Tribes tend to be highly fundamentalist in
their interpretation of Islam largely because fundamentalist Islam is
a system which offers considerable advantages to tribal alpha males,
such as the aforementioned polygamy. The creator of Islam, Muhammad,
was a tribal warlord himself.

Sectarian
violence in Iraq during the US occupation

Zarqawi’s stated
aim was to precipitate a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and
Shiites. His goal was to undermine Iraqi nationalism for reasons I
will explain later. Most Sunnis were not
on board
with this plan, particularly the jihadist leadership in Afghanistan
and the majority of Sunnis in Iraq. The tribal warlords who held sway
in the Sunni regions of Iraq (located in the central, west, and
northern parts of the country) had everything to lose from a
protracted war against the Shiites who were ~66% of the population.
Their plan was instead to establish a confederacy within the borders
of Iraq so that they could practice a degree of autonomy. The
warlords viewed Zarqawi as a foreign troublemaker and harped on the
fact that he had come from Afghanistan to wage war against a "foreign
power" when he himself was a foreigner to Iraq meddling in Iraqi
affairs.

According to
Napoleoni, Zarqawi was well aware of his perception as a foreigner,
but did not accept it as valid criticism. He did not consider the
Sykes-Picot arrangement as valid, and sought to redraw the region’s
boundaries on sectarian lines instead. In his view, he was not an
outsider, but a Muslim in the lands of Islam. Zarqawi opposed Iraqi
nationalism because Iraqi nationalism was a dire threat to his life,
his mission, and his organization. If the Sunnis rallied around a
nationalistic banner, his pan-Islamic organization’s ideology
would become viewed as a threat to be excised by not just Shiites,
but also his Sunni brethren. Through his terrorism in the name of
Sunni Islam, he attempted to poison the well of Sunni-Shiite
relations so extensively that a unified state would become
impossible. With the power vacuum left by Saddam’s fall, it
appeared Zarqawi had plenty of space to maneuver and craft such a
venomous milieu.

Ironically, Iraqi nationalism was also a strong danger to the United States.
Chapter 10 in Insurgent Iraq describes a botched campaign of prewar bribery,
one where the US had managed to stoke resentment even within their supposed
Shiite allies. The funds it distributed to the Shiite political warlords who
helped pave the way for its invasion were (predictably) corrupt and hoarding
money intended for the Iraqi public amongst themselves and their cronies. Furthermore,
Washington’s Shiite agents were mostly composed of individuals who had
been expelled from Iraq by Saddam during the 80s and 90s. Many of them had not
set foot in Iraq for years. These new US-sponsored political leaders were alien
to the local Iraqis, notably the powerful clerics of the Sadr family. Moqtada
al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric backed by his Mahdi Army militia, claimed to represent
the interests of his sect’s poor and downtrodden in Iraq. Sadr was essentially
the warlord of Baghdad’s Shiite slums and his men battled US forces throughout
Baghdad in response to the occupation. Sadr openly shunned the upper class Shiites
collaborating with US occupation forces, choosing instead to ally himself with
Iran in exchange for funds and training for his militiamen. This development
was important because it provided a political and military entry point for Iran
into the Iraq War.

Effectively, the
US had thus created enemies with both the Sunnis and the Shiite lower
class. The
nightmare scenario for the United States was that Sadr’s Mahdi
Army would sign an agreement with the Sunni insurgent groups in West
Iraq, thereby
forming a unified national front against the US occupation and
critically endangering any claim they might have made on forming a
government in the name of national unity.
The
US thus had to undermine Iraqi nationalism from coming into being
under the pretext of armed opposition to the US occupation. They
instead sought to funnel nationalism, via a system of bribery and
military force, into a US-dominated order held aloft by a charade of
democratic elections.

Of course, this
bribery was not effective in actually building a coherent Iraqi
nation. Factions would participate in elections only to keep the
American money flowing and, as we will see, when the US left, Iraq
broke down along militant sectarian lines again. The farce of Iraqi
“democracy” was a PR stunt to convince Americans that
Bush and the neocons had not swindled America out of billions for a
war that had failed on its original promises and was producing
countless casualties on both sides.

According to
Norman Cigar, the US believed it would be able to ignore the Sunnis
at the outset of the Iraqi rebuilding effort, and thus focused its
bribery efforts on the Shiites and Kurds, funneling money to
cooperative “politicians” and granting them power within
a US-designed state. The Sunnis responded to the American strategy
with a sustained revolt against the US occupation between 2003-8,
coming to a head in two battles for Fallujah in 2004. Chapter 11 of
Insurgent
Iraq describes
how it was during the second battle of Fallujah that JTJ made a name
for itself as one of the vanguard groups of the Iraqi resistance. The
US stated their goal in Fallujah was the dismantlement the “Zarqawi
network” purported to be based there. Despite massive
destruction and devastation inflicted on Fallujah from an American
encirclement and siege, they failed to do so, probably because
Zarqawi wasn’t even in Fallujah to begin with. Following
America’s failure to dismantle JTJ with such an enormous show
of force, Zarqawi became a superstar among jihadists worldwide.

Islam and
tribalism

Political Islam
has always sought to undermine the power of the tribes. Muhammad
himself was a low-ranking member of the Quraysh tribe and his story,
if we are to look at it rationally, is essentially about how he used
a divine pretext to overthrow the tribal leaders of his own family
and assume the dominant position.

The ideology of
ISIS and al-Qaeda is referred to as "Salafism," and it is a
movement stressing a return to the literal and metaphysical
foundations of Islam. It even entails mimicking the lifestyle of
Muhammad and his followers in 7th century Arabia. This is considered
an insane proposition to many Muslims (and non-Muslims), but this
brand of piety does find a very large following in tribal regions
across the Muslim world. One reason for this is that many of the
lower caste tribal youth resonate very strongly with the story of
Muhammad and seek to recreate his story.
Tribal systems, even those outside of the Arab world in places like
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kurdistan, are breeding grounds for this
type of religious fanaticism. The
Salafists seek to replace the irrational authority of the tribal
warlords with the irrational authority of religious scholars and
Mujahidin.

JTJ
metamorphoses into Al Qaeda in Iraq

After the second
battle of Fallujah, Zarqawi’s propaganda apparatus purported him as
one of the heroes of the fight against the Americans. As the legend
went, he was one of the few who had stood his ground against suicidal
odds and clambered out of the rubble to fight another day. Zarqawi
still had problems with legitimacy and funding in Iraq. The issue of
legitimacy arose from the persistent nationalist angle perpetuated by
Sunni Iraqis, as well as his lack of religious authority. According
to Cigar, to cope with the first problem, he had to start recruiting
Sunnis from within Iraq in order to give the organization a more
"national" flavor. He got these recruits from the lower
strata of the Iraqi tribal system. Essentially, he offered these
individuals, who had no hope of social mobility in their own system
due to birth order, an opportunity to have a stake in a new, Islamic
"tribe."

Loretta Napoleoni
described Zarqawi as functionally illiterate, and militant Islamists
derive much of their social support from the fact that their leaders
are titular experts in Islamic doctrine in a region where theology is
considered the supreme form of thought. Zarqawi’s Sunni rivals
were able to encourage Islamic scholars in Iraq to label his mission
of establishing a caliphate and an Islamic State theologically
impure, and so he was losing the ability to find recruits and find
sanctuary amongst the members of his sect. He had to find religious
authorities to sanction his mission, and he found that lifeline with
a couple of old associates: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri:
the heads of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, religious scholars, and experts
in jihadist financing.

The alliance
between Zarqawi and bin Laden was mutually beneficial. Osama bin
Laden wanted a stake in the Iraqi violence, as the war in Afghanistan
was going poorly for him. He offered to make Zarqawi an "emir"
of al Qaeda, essentially making him a sponsored warlord of Iraq and
giving him access to all of Qaeda’s financial and political
connections in the Arab Gulf. Bin Laden also issued religious edicts
sanctifying Zarqawi’s mission, thus granting him, at the very
least, a temporary theological shield with which to ward off the
lacerating words of his critics.

Ironically, the
US’s harping on Zarqawi as a boogeyman made
him more popular.
It was free publicity for him. One of the reasons why bin Laden
selected Zarqawi as his emir was because he was by far the most
well-known jihadist, and such an alliance would bring great prestige
to al Qaeda. However, this also implicitly meant that bin Laden
signed onto Zarqawi’s sectarian war. This development is ironic
given that JTJ was only one of many jihadist factions, but the US, in
its desperation to fabricate a strawman it could point to as “proof”
that American forces had a coherent enemy in Iraq, ended up bringing
to life the fictional Frankenstein they’d been obsessively
parading before the eyes of the world. It is a sad fact that much of
the current Iraqi tragedy came about because of Bush’s cynicism
and narcissism in trying to sell across propaganda points to the
American public.

In 2005, JTJ
changed its name to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and continued its bombing
attacks. By 2006, Zarqawi got what he finally looking for: a civil
war in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites. Hostilities erupted after his
operatives blew up the Askari
shrine,
one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam. These massive sectarian
hostilities were the de facto end of Iraq within its Sykes-Picot
borders.

However, in
addition to the Shiites, Zarqawi had also managed to precipitate a
war against the Sunni tribal warlords in Iraq who began to see him as
a serious threat to their rule now that he was recruiting their lower
caste to fight against them. This AQI-Tribal war heated up
significantly in 2005 when Zarqawi bombed hotels in Jordan
and
Egypt,
which were housing Iraqi tribal leaders who had found sanctuary there
away from the Iraqi violence. This move was his undoing, as Zarqawi
had then created enough Iraqi enemies that he had scant few places to
find refuge.

AQI had bitten
off more than it could chew, now fighting a war against the
superpower, Sunni tribal warlords, and the Shiite majority of Iraq.

Zarqawi was
finally killed in a US airstrike in July 2006. He was replaced by
another operative named Abu Ayyub al Masri who steered AQI in much
the same way that Zarqawi had, focusing on "high-profile"
bombings of Shiite targets, usually civilians and the holy shrines
and mosques sacred to them.

Sahwa Militias
and the disintegration of the Iraqi state

In 2005, general
elections were held in Iraq, which the Sunnis boycotted. I am jumping
around here in the timeline, but I promise this section will end
being temporally coherent. All of the information I use on Sahwa
militias and other players mentioned in this section can be found in
Norman Cigar’s book.

With the Sunni
boycott, the United States again had a problem with its PR in that
one of the three major sects refused to recognize the legitimacy of
the Iraqi state, thus detonating the premise of Iraqi nationalism
being the unifying factor behind the new government. Sunnis had no
interest in joining an order dominated by Shiites and Kurds. By the
US-designed law, the president of Iraq must be a Kurd, and the prime
minister will inevitably be Shiite since they are more than 60% of the
population of Iraq. Sunnis thus had very little interest in democracy
in a place where they were heavily outnumbered. They were the
kingmakers under Saddam and were not willing to join the government
established by the Americans. For them, no Iraq would be better than
an Iraq under American-imposed circumstances and Shiite rule.

US command viewed
JTJ/AQI as an obstacle in getting Sunni popular opinion on their
side, and so they began searching for divisions within the sect that
they could exploit and thus rattle Zarqawi’s power base. They
found agents with the tribal warlords whom the Salafist groups had
greatly agitated and warred against. Trial runs of arming Zarqawi’s
tribal enemies began in 2005, but it was not until September 2006
that agreements between tribal warlords and the United States to
fight the Salafists went public. This strategic maneuver on the
Americans’ part enraged the Shiite political establishment
because, by then, the sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites had
reached a fevered pitch. Shiites viewed the US-Tribal alliance as an
act of treachery, believing that the US was trying to engineer a
stalemate, exhaust both sides, and prolong the war. Arming Sunni
tribal militias, who now called themselves the "Sahwa"
(translation: Awakening) in Iraq, was a critical juncture in the
country’s history. In bolstering the military might of a sector
of the Iraqi population that had already historically existed as a
“state” for centuries, the Americans further eroded any
chance that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi central government could
exercise a monopoly on force within its Sykes-Picot geography.

Around the time
of its alliance with the Sahwa, the US also began to design its
"surge" strategy where it would increase the number of US
troops by 20,000 in the Sunni regions of Iraq.

Like the Shiites
the US funded, these Sahwa leaders were also corrupt and hoarded
their cash stockpiles. The US was spending millions of dollars a day
on these Sahwa militias and incompetence and corruption was rife  it
was estimated that the rosters submitted to US command for salary
payments by tribal leaders were padded with up to 60% fake names, and
these warlords spent the American-distributed cash on frivolities
like mansions painted pink, stables of race horses, and sports
cars  all courtesy of the US taxpayer (or the Federal Reserve,
depending on how you look at it).

However, the US
kept paying because the strategy was working, and the Sahwa were
successful in curbing the activities of AQI. They probably ratted out
Zarqawi to the US, who killed him in the aforementioned 2006 air
strike, and they also helped locate and kill Zarqawi’s successors. At
their height, the Sahwa fielded an estimated 118,000 men in Iraq. For
comparisons sake, AQI probably had only 1,000 operatives, many of
whom were probably foreign fighters alien to the terrain.

I will now skip
an expanse of time, from 2007 to 2011, because these four years
essentially see the marginalization and near disintegration of AQI
thanks to the efforts of the Sahwa militias. During these years, AQI
also changes its name to the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and takes a
more Iraq-centric focus, consolidating its dwindling power base
there. However, geopolitical earthquakes would rock the region in
2011 and rattle what was considered to be Zarqawi’s absurd and
unfulfilled fantasy of restoring the Caliphate back to life.

Describing
Jihadi Organizations

I’m including
this section in order to better explain how these jihadist
organizations derive their power. The jihadist mission is easily
compared to European colonial-settler movements that were popular in
the 19th century, only jihad is an export from the Gulf Arab states
and thus assumes an Arab “flavor” (which makes me
nauseous, might I add). Because these Gulf states derive their vast
wealth from pumping
black stuff
out of the ground rather than contributing intellectual and
scientific value to civilization, they can afford to indulge in
self-serving religious backwardness. This fosters societies low on
human capital, high in monetary capital, a cultish obsession with
Islam, and a demographic of men willing to venture abroad to conquer
other nations using religion as their pretext.

The Middle East
is, as you may have long-realized, a medieval place. The tribal
regions are, generally, stuck in the 10th
or 11th century
in terms of their thinking, as evidenced by their hereditary
distribution of power, fundamentalist religiosity, and lack of
industry. The most dangerous tribes are those like the Saudis, who
have vast wealth and thus access to all of the First World’s
weapons. The al-Saud tribe derives its rule from internal religious
authorities.
People like Zarqawi and bin Laden were essentially looking to
replicate the example of the al-Saud’s elsewhere in the world.
In Zarqawi’s case, it was Iraq; in bin Laden’s,
Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda’s
leadership are religious scholars. Bin Laden himself was probably an
adept of Islamic theology, although it is equally likely that he
purchased his Islamic "degree" and flaunted it as proof of
his authority given how wealthy he was relative to his
contemporaries. Although I used the colonial analogy, I also like to
think of Al Qaeda and similar organizations as being the Muslim
analogs to the Catholic Church in the medieval era, back when they
sent mercenaries on "Crusades" to conquer foreign,
un-Christian lands. Like the Crusaders, these al Qaeda operatives
traverse the world in search of apostates to kill and a land upon
which to establish their holy state.

It is my opinion
that the reason why there are sects in the first place is due to the
fact that one warlord using religious "authority" runs up
against another person using the same religious authority and they
essentially split off into divergent and antagonistic religio-tribal
organizations. In the Arab world, the people who obsessively accuse
others of apostasy as a pretext for violence are called Takfiris.
This
term is used in a pejorative manner, as the strategy of declaring
enemies to be apostate is well known and has been performed
throughout history by troublemakers. ISIS is the best example of a
Takfiri organization. Takfirism is analogous to the prevalent tactic
in the West conflating adversaries with Hitler and Nazis, or as
“enemies of democracy.”

2011

The two critical
events that occurred in 2011 were the civil wars in Libya and Syria,
as well as the US withdrawal from Iraq.

The fall of
Gaddafi produced a strategic situation which saw Libyan jihadists,
with the help of US air support, overrun Libya. What resulted was a
situation where these jihadists opened up Gaddafi’s weapons stores to
every other Jihadi group in the Middle East to purchase, and the war
in Syria was the primary market for these "liberated" arms
caches. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar were making several
airlifts and cargo shipments
from Libya to Turkey and back in order to facilitate the dispensation
of weapons to an assortment of rebels, including ISIS and Jabhat
al-Nusra, the "official" al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. These
arms ended up reenergizing the jihadist movement in Syria.

So, ironically, the United States, in destabilizing Libya, helped to pave the
way for the rise of ISIS when a flood of fresh Libyan weapons came into their
hands, most notably antitank and even anti-air weapons. The Libyan intervention
is likely to go down as one of the greatest blunders of American foreign policy,
as it has created yet another jihadist outpost,
this time on African soil.

The war in Syria,
unlike the Libyan conflict, is defined as a sectarian war similar to
the Iraq’s. The "president" of Syria (really just the
leader of the largest fighting force) is Bashar al-Assad, a member of
the Alawite sect of Islam. To Sunni jihadists, rule by an apostate
Alawite is obviously unacceptable, and he is thus a great target for
Takfirist defamation, especially given the fact that Syria is 80%
Sunni. It was easy to paint Assad as a committed oppressor of Sunnis
given these circumstances, and such sentiment was greatly fueled by
the fact that the Sunnis were largely the losers of Iraq’s
civil war and perpetual victims of a continuing Shiite conspiracy to
dominate Sunni Islam. However, not to say Assad is even remotely a
good guy, but his wife is a Sunni, and much of his army and its
command are Sunnis as well. In other words, the idea that Assad is
necessarily sectarian is false.

As the Libyan and
Syrian wars ensued and set each respective country back a hundred
years or more, the US began its preparations to leave Iraq in 2011.
Part of this meant that they would cease their payments to the Sahwa
militias, instantaneously leaving vast swathes of Sunni street thugs
unemployed
and politically marginalized.
In arming these militias, the Americans had created a
state-within-a-state situation. According to Cigar, The central
government had no authority to rein these militias in, and
integrating the militias into the armed forces had failed.

What ensued after
the US withdrawal was the fracturing of the "central"
(really Shiite, Baghdad-based) government along sectarian lines. The
Shiite Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, sent Shiite troops to occupy
the Sunni towns in Iraq, where they massacred civilians, and deposed
Sunni politicians. Maliki even sentenced a former Sunni vice
president, who served up until 2009, to death
in absentia.

Simultaneously,
because of the sectarian overtones of the Syrian war, Sunni donors
from the Gulf states began to contribute vast amounts of money to al
Qaeda central leadership in the Af-Pak tribal belt in order to fund the
jihad against Assad. Al Qaeda subsequently increased the funding of
its Iraqi cells to join the fight in Syria, as they were still
operational on the Syrian border. ISI operatives were to infiltrate
Syria under the organizational title "Jabhat al-Nusra"
(JN), which translates to "The Front of Helpers."

Due to the fact
that many former Sahwa militiamen were now broke with the departure
of the United States, and because there was little use for their
skills as career thugs outside the army in Iraq’s economy, many
joined the fight in Syria under facilitation by JN. JN thus found a
stable base within Iraq from which they could launch strikes into
Syria. This Qaeda-tribal realignment represents another pivotal point
in the history of ISIS.

US
destabilization of Syria

In its support
for toppling Assad by aiding the Syrian rebels, many of whose
allegiances exist in a state of flux and who have defected to ISIS,
the US essentially made it possible for ISIS to rise and take command
of eastern Syria. While you can argue that Washington probably didn’t
directly arm and train ISIS, it nonetheless facilitated and supported
a chaos scenario where ISIS could rise to the top of the jihadist
hierarchy.

Ironically, in
2010, Assad offered to assist the US in a war
against Takfiri rebels operating on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Assad’s
government has fought jihadists for decades and considered themselves
“experts” on the affair. The US refused and, in 2011,
they armed jihadists instead to depose Assad.

Jabhat al
Nusra and ISIS

JN quickly gained
a reputation as being the most extreme
(and most effective) rebel fighting group in Syria. They were better
funded, better trained, and many had had years of experience fighting
US occupation forces in Iraq. One of the byproducts of wars is the
creation of a class of experienced fighters. While many militants die
in these infantry-based guerilla wars, the ones who survive tend to
be resilient given their experience advantage. JN had a great number
of survivors from conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and
Chechnya.

Furthermore, the
extreme factions will often find the best recruits and people most
willing to join up with their cause. If you look at the history of
statehood in general, it is usually the most murderous and extreme of
the militias who rise to power. This was true of the Leninists in
Russia, the Zionists in Palestine, and it appears ISIS in Iraq/Syria.

JN eventually
fractured, however, forming a splinter group called the Islamic State
in Iraq and Sham (Sham = Levant in Arabic). Effectively, the ISI
fraction of JN had gotten "too
extreme”
for al Qaeda’s tastes. Perhaps too much of Zarqawi’s ghost had lived
on in the organization. This schism precipitated bloodshed between JN
members and the newly formed ISIS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. JN
was getting a lot of negative press in the West and the greater
Middle East because of its penchant for using massacres as a tool for
terrorizing populations into submission, as well as other heinous
crimes such as mass rapes of female captives and wanton looting.
Ironically, ISIS practiced Takfirism against JN in order to justify
its split.

The schism was
likely a calculated move on the part of ISIS, who were now the main
players on the Iraqi-Syrian border. They did not need AQ central
leadership because they had enough support from the Iraqi tribal
system to survive and thrive.

ISIS

What
distinguished ISIS from the rest of the militias operating in Syria
was that it had a coherent goal of statehood in mind, while other
groups were just focused on toppling Assad. The state-building
project entailed a focus on combat, but also a considerable attention
was given to subduing the civilian population through propaganda and
terror. The group was experienced in both facets of sowing the seeds
of statehood, having had years of practice in Iraq and in other
conflicts around the globe, most notably the Chechen-Russian wars.

ISIS also has an
international
angle,
unlike the Syrian and Iraqi nationalist militias. This international
focus gives them access to a far larger pool of recruits, and has
enabled them to link up with several other jihadist factions across
the world, notably the Chechen jihadists and other fighters across
Europe and the Caucuses. The Chechens are also highly experienced
fighters, having fought the Russians for years, and so they
constitute one of the most deadly
fighting forces in Iraq and Syria. The field commander of ISIS
operates under the field name Abu
Omar al-Shishani
(literally Abu Omar The Chechen).

ISIS’s breakout
moment was their June 2014 invasion of northern Iraq, which began
with a jailbreak
of thousands of Sunni prisoners from Iraqi military jails. In the
eyes of ISIS, the Iraqi military are essentially a Shiite militia,
referring to them pejoratively as the "Army of the Safavids,"
with Safavid
being a reference to medieval Persian, Shiite rulers of Mesopotamia.

Following this
jailbreak, ISIS launched a blitz
on northern Iraq,
seizing Mosul, Iraq’s oil-rich, and second largest city, as well as
taking control of towns all over western and central Iraq. The
US-trained Iraqi army, which took billions of dollars and years to
create, effectively collapsed
in 24 hours. 30,000 Iraqi troops shrank back in the face of about
3,000 ISIS militiamen, resulting in one of the greatest military
routs in the region’s history.

If you remember
how I mentioned previously that a great deal of this jihadist
doctrine is tied into the militias viewing themselves as walking the
path of the ancient, “untainted” Muslims around the time
of Muhammad, then this episode featuring the ISIS blitzkrieg unto
Iraq was a fulfillment of prophecy in the minds of Sunnis and ISIS.
The original Muslim conquests of Mesopotamia and the Levant proceeded
in the same blitz fashion, where a small army of Muslims conquered
Byzantine and Persian armies
which often outnumbered them by 4 or 5 times. The conquest by ISIS
affirmed in the minds of Sunnis that history was repeating itself as
the "true Muslims" routed the infidels thanks to the grace
of god and the holiness of their mission.

However, the real
story is less fantastical. ISIS had only took over the Sunni areas of
Iraq which were under effective occupation by Shiite forces. Shiite
troops and even the Sunnis serving alongside them in the Iraqi army
had no interest in losing their lives for the sake of a corrupt
authority in Baghdad bent on policing a disparate Sunni population.
They dropped their guns, ran and were summarily routed by ISIS.
Shiites
were executed
and Sunnis were spared as part of an ISIS amnesty program for their
fellow Sunnis who had gone “wayward.” The sparing of the
lives of Sunnis is actually a development in the tactics of ISIS, as
they were against such amnesty policies in their past, less
compromising iterations, notably under Zarqawi.

ISIS publicized
images and video of the rout and ensuing capture of hundreds of
Shiite troops, executing them on camera in systematic fashion. This
represented Iraq officially splitting on its sectarian lines. Because
the Iraqi Army left their equipment largely intact, ISIS
got access to tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters
(which they don’t know how to use yet), and a large amount of
ammunition, uniforms, and other types of hardware to help them
consolidate rule over north and central Iraq. In addition, they
robbed the central bank of Mosul and other banks across Iraq which
led to them claiming up to 400
million dollars
in cash.

In addition to
the arms and cash, ISIS also seized the precious bounty of oil fields
across northern Iraq and now makes perhaps
3 million a day
in black market oil sales according to experts. Cash
and oil has made ISIS self-sufficient, and it is perhaps this
conquest strategy is a large reason why they abandoned al Qaeda
central leadership to begin with. ISIS had no intention on sharing
the spoils of their hard-fought labor with an isolated leadership far
away from the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The success of
ISIS has led hundreds of people from Europe and other parts of the
world streaming into the area under ISIS control to pledge allegiance
to their organization, with some estimated 6,300
aspiring jihadists
migrating to Syria and Mesopotamia in the month of July 2014 alone.

Upon conquering northern and central Iraq, ISIS changed its name to the Islamic
State (IS), and declared Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph Ibrahim. Upon declaration
of the restoration of the Caliphate, the Kurds also formally announced their
plans
to break from the Iraqi central government, hearkening the subsequent rebirth
of Kurdistan.

In response to
the ISIS takeover, Obama sent 300
advisors
to Iraq. Ironically, the Iranian revolutionary guards are also in
Iraq at the time of this writing to help bolster the defenses of
Baghdad in expectation of an ISIS push to take control of Baghdad. At
the end of August, Obama announced yet another
300 troops
were to be sent back to Mesopotamia following the execution of
American reporter James Foley and ISIS threats to murder another,
Steven Sotloff.

The Islamic
State and Kurdistan

The Kurds are
dispersed throughout the Middle East, although they have a large
territory in the Northeast of Iraq in the mountain ranges between
Iraq and Iran and on the border with Turkey. Ironically, this is
where Zarqawi initially found refuge when he fled Afghanistan.

ISIS began
operations on Kurdistan in late July of this year, but prior to the
commencement of those hostilities, they had been rooting out
religious minorities under their dominion in Mosul and Anbar
province. The message to the non-Sunnis was to convert to Islam or
pay a "jizya," which is essentially a tax for not being a
Sunni Muslim. After a short period, ISIS arbitrarily changed the
message to "leave
or die,"
thus triggering an exodus of Christians from northern Iraq.

After the
Christians, the jihadists turned their sights on the Kurds, and the
opening of this front is where the line in the sand was drawn by the
United States. In
the geopolitical theater, Obama had no intentions on allowing ISIS to
usurp Kurdistan, as such a development posed a grave threat to the
geopolitical balance in the region as it would place ISIS on the
borders of both Iran and Turkey.

Iraqi Kurdistan
is a socially divided entity. There are Salafi
jihadist Kurds
who generally are youth and low caste tribesmen. Kurds are also
mostly Sunni Muslim, which would have meant that the transnational
ISIS would possibly be able to incorporate Kurdistan as one of its
"emirates."

The Kurdish
leadership has a good relationship with Washington, as they were the
chief, unflinching collaborators with the US occupation. They are
also considered a vital part of the intelligence apparatus in the
greater Middle East area, as they work with Mossad and the CIA to spy
on neighboring Iran.

International
outcry came about once ISIS added the Yezidi religious group to its
genocidal hit list, leading to a set of massacres and the hot pursuit
of a civilian Yezidi population up Shingal Mountain. The Yezidis
began
dying of thirst
in the caves of their makeshift stronghold in the ensuing ISIS siege
and it was at this time that the Americans made a humanitarian air
drop to them while the world watched on. Assistance to Yezidis facing
genocide was the political cover story for launching airstrikes on
ISIS. The way I see Washington’s message to ISIS is “don’t
mess with the Kurds, you can have everything else.”

While Obama was
probably willing to tolerate the Sunni parts of Iraq falling to ISIS,
the Kurdish regions were a red line. This is evidenced by the fact
that there was no vitriolic reaction to the fall of Mosul and the
drive of ISIS toward Baghdad. In fact, the central government of Iraq
essentially had to turn to the Russians,
who are allied with Assad and Iran, in order to assist them with the
vital problems facing their rule in Iraq. Furthermore, there is the
question as to why NATO member Turkey never sought to crush ISIS,
despite the fact that they were willing to go as far as to stage a
false
flag attack on their own civilians to justify such a measure.
Perhaps the US did not trust the Turks enough not to violate the
sovereignty of the Kurds, whom they have been in on-and-off
wars with for decades.

The relatively
muted US response, which includes only limited airstrikes, and only
airstrikes in ISIS’s Iraqi half, could be because it wants to
keep ISIS intact enough that it continues to constitute a thorn in
the side of Iran on its eastern border and Assad in the West. Perhaps
Washington has learned its lesson regarding the dangers of creating
power vacuums.
The best case scenario for Washington may be a prolonged war between
the Sunnis of Iraq and the Levant and the Shiite countries bordering
them.

Notes on the
Kurds

The information
I’m including below is not to vilify Kurds, but rather to
provide some clarity about the people who Washington is supporting.

Kurdish rule in
Iraq is essentially a dictatorship led by the Barzani clan. It is a
tribal area, like the culture of their Sunni Arab adversaries. In
2011, they violently suppressed
protests by their fellow Kurds protesting the Barzani dictatorship.
It is also an area where female genital mutilation is considered
normal and, despite a nominal “ban” in response to
Western pressure, the practice continues
unabated. Note, male genital mutilation is also endemic across the
Middle East, although it is FGM which generally gets Westerners up in
arms, so I highlight this because it flies in the face of the
narrative purported by the US government that it is assisting a free,
democratic bastion of civilization against murderous religious
fanatics. Truth is, it is one medieval set of people clashing with
against another set of people whose psychologies lie somewhere
between the invention of the agriculture and the Industrial
Revolution.

Notes on US
involvement

I think it is
necessary to recap how the US helped precipitate this crisis:

They invaded Iraq, thus upsetting the balance of power there and leaving
a vacuum to be filled by Zarqawi and JTJ

They pursued a policy of sectarian divide-and-conquer, thus effectively
setting up sectarian military boundaries in Iraq when they simultaneously
armed Sunni tribes alongside the Shiite-dominated central government

The attack on Libya that toppled Gaddafi created the rise of jihadists
there and a subsequent flood of weapons into Syria that bolstered ISIS

US support for rebel groups in Syria undermined Assad who was a bulwark
against Jihadism in the region, again bolstering ISIS

Walead Farwana
is an American researcher, writer, and amateur historian currently residing
in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 with
a Bachelor’s degree in biology. Walead is fluent in Arabic, with over a year
of Middle East travel under his belt. You can follow him on Twitter @Walled_Farana

Justin Raimondo pieced together a much more revealing story in 2006 here on this website. Zarwai or Zarqai was allowed to live in Kurdistan by US . Iran at one time had this guy with other AlQuida . Iran was ready to swap this set of terrorist with MEK . Those same figures who orchestrated Niger forgery along with other neocons ripped that opportunity to shreds .
If this guy created Isis ,then the links to Isis to the neocons here and abroad should be investigated